In watching The Incredibles, I was struck by how they integrated really old-school style heroes into a modern context, and I mean really made them a part of it - they had to interact within a system with consequences, &c &c. Yes, it was cartoonish, hell it was a cartoon, but it seemed to me a great deal better than the other old way of doing superheroes, who are practically a context unto themselves. I can't really speak for anything recent, given my self-imposed exile from comic book stores, but I do remember improving trends like Gen13 2.0 practically having its plot initiated by 9-11, and some of the X-Men comics playing more active roles and reacting to governments such as the EU.

      And yeah I think that's cool, and that it's a real upgrade to a nice place (balancing superhero-ness and interaction with context), but all in all I always preferred the ones that I knew of that went entirely over to the context side of things: Aberrant, which led into Aeon Trinity. These were games published by White Wolf that had a somewhat standard premise of mutation leading to supernatural abilities, but went an entirely different route. The only thing resembling superheros in Aberrant were viciously satirized, almost like Marvel's X-Statix but with more than just a focus on the media-angle; eventually, (following the-most-dangerous-thing-that-can-happen-to-a-people-is-a-Hero theme in Dune) the "Aberrants" are almost the cause of an apocalypse and are exiled, inverting a number of the usual themes. From there, the focus on the philisophical questions of being supernatural in Aberrant lead to the practical superceding of context-over-"hero," where even the supernatural soldiers supposedly fighting for the good side are almost certainly anti-heroes, and the only good is a lesser evil with the best chance of surviving. I mean, you can't beat that kind of stuff (in my opinion anyway).

-who's up for foraging with me? I know ocotilla flowers taste like honeysuckle and prickly pear pears taste kind of like cranberries off the top of my head, but what else is there? I bet there's a huge amount. Oh palo verde seeds can be used like pine nuts..hmm...